


Lots of Romance

by o666666



Category: Sex Education (TV)
Genre: F/M, pre-season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22680196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/o666666/pseuds/o666666
Summary: One day Jean would die and he would die and all it took was a sneeze in the doorway to convince him against years of practiced reserve that it didn’t matter so much as spending time with her.Or, deciding to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Four scenes before/around Season 2.
Relationships: Jean Milburn/Jakob Nyman
Comments: 1
Kudos: 44





	Lots of Romance

He calls her as she’s wiping down the kitchen counter.

“I want to see you.”

It makes her shiver.

“You saw me for lunch.”

During the break between appointments (hers) and some caulking and a sweaty toilet (his), they’d eaten olives and petits toasts on the porch while she pointed out all the down-the-hill neighbors—plus relevant gossip. _That’s my son’s best friend’s_ , she’d informed him fondly, Jakob’s arms around her, gesturing to the center of three identical houses.

He smiled and rubbed his scruff against her neck. _The boy with the clothes._

Yes. The boy with the clothes.

Honestly, Jean was a little to the left of Symonds Yat. The neighbors probably had more to say of her than she of them.

_You didn’t just come here for my toasts, did you?_ Jean asked him eventually, plucking his shirt, and he hadn’t.

And now, on the phone: “A beautiful woman lives down the road, Jean. And if I walked just five minutes I could kiss her.”

She hums.

“I could rub her shoulders.”

She had rearranged the sculptures in her office and was terribly sore. _I do it next time_ , he’d told her this afternoon, flexing his muscles for show.

“Your girls are asleep?” she asked. But she was already fixing her hair a little, rooting around for the good pajamas.

“I will leave them a note downstairs. And they will never leave their rooms to find it.”

He’d told her earlier: _They watch the videos of_ …. he dabbed his face, like with a beauty sponge. _Crazy makeup. For hours!_

So they began to sneak around like teenagers.

“I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

He did not stay that first night—she was who she was, and they were both shy besides. But later he did.

-

“I have to cook for you,” he informs her, as tonight Otis will be at Eric’s. “What do you like.”

Jean rolls her eyes around the room, flushed. He must be kidding.

She has taken to visiting him at his work sites bearing coffee (his) and tea (hers) in late morning and today she is sitting on the white formica counter of a pink bathroom in between the Jack and Jill sinks. Jakob is half-in, half-out of the equally pink shower-bath, doing something awful to the drain.

“Something easy. That sounds wonderful. I can stop at the supermarket.” She picks at her cup until he washes his hands and takes it from her.

“I am trying to impress you,” he says. Circles her kneecap with his thumb. Lifts her dress a little before he looks her in the eyes. “Roast chicken, or prawns?”

They have the roast chicken. Jakob cannot think of the word for _baster_ and shows her with charades, which look as though he’s squeezing a breast.

_Watch this_ , he instructs, before carefully spooning three lemon slices into the cavity. Jean makes a face.

And he does impress her. After the first bite she sits there in silence, jaw dropped for dramatic effect, eyebrows in her hair. His ears turn red.

She fawns and fawns, _how did you_ do _this, it’s_ delicious.

“Always better when someone makes for you.”

When Jean was a very little girl this is what her mother would say of sandwiches; a sandwich at lunchtime is always better when someone makes it for you. As sandwiches were made for daughters by her mother before her. She vows, the next time she visits Jakob at work, to bring him lunch.

-

He is taking up most of her bed and she is lying alongside him, receiving a back scratch. With their full bellies pressed together, her feet only reach his knees. “So how bout this,” he pitches. His hand hovers. “When you see me, you see only me.”

She lifts her head to blink at him and demonstrate skepticism.

“I don’t want sex with other people,” he expounds.

All his body hair is blonde. She kisses his shoulder. “I know you don’t.”

“I thought maybe you don’t want sex with other people too.”

And if his eyes were his hands they’d still be cradling her like a china doll. He’s so earnest that she gives his upper arm a squeeze.

“I haven’t tried … exclusivity,” she explains. “For a long while.”

He’s still as deep water. Reacts thoughtfully to everything.

“But I … I entered this arrangement with the—” She can’t stop fiddling with him, his collarbone, the fine hair curling onto his neck. “I’ve assumed—” A deep breath. “We’ve only had sex together. Since we’ve had sex.”

He grins. “I’m your boyfriend.”

Jean sputters. “We are … romantic, yes.”

“OK.” Jakob fixes the covers around them. “Good.” He takes a gulp of water from the mug on the nightstand, then holds it out to her. “Thirsty?”

She shakes her head.

“ _I don’t know_ … ” he sings, babying her in a way that will irritate and entertain her for very possibly—though little does she know it—the rest of her life. And bless him for it. “ _Lots of exercise, have to hydrate_ … ”

She rolls her eyes. But she finishes the cup.

And when she lowers it there he is again, angelic on the pillows, mooning in her direction. It shakes her. How did she find him?

“I moved here,” he says, as if reading her mind, “for the girls, you know, fresh start, painful memories. For Ola.”

She nods.

“Didn’t think … ” He holds her hand. He didn’t think of such a person as Jean. Didn’t think he would ever say more than four words to another single mother home to preside over her construction project. Didn’t think he could be surprised by people, or intrigued, or thrilled, or pleased, or want to protect them despite the costs, because that’s what it had been with Jean: a willingness to know her though it could all go badly, in fact someday surely would. One day Jean would die and he would die and all it took was a sneeze in the doorway to convince him against years of practiced reserve that it didn’t matter so much as spending time with her. He is so _curious_ about her. But there is too much to say, after all. Jean watches him watching her, thinking of her teary-eyed, searching for one thing of many things to mention that might name them all, and she cups his cheek. This man. 

He sniffs, embarrassed. Wipes an eye on his wrist. “Come kiss your boyfriend.” 

“Oh, please.” But she does.

“I have lots of romance,” he tells her.

She pats his chest above the _Maria_. “I know you do.”

“Serious business.”

“I know!”

He tickles her. “Very, very serious. I’m tough guy, Jean.”

“You’re smushing me!”

-

Jakob had followed her up the stairs and into her bedroom. Only inside had she slipped off her clunky shoes and spun around, hanging on his neck so he would bend to kiss her, which he now he does (and does and does).

Her cold little hands make him jump. “ _Eesh!_ ” He gathers and rubs them furiously. “Freezing woman, Jean. Terrible circulation.”

_Terrible circulation_. Sometimes Jakob says things that only a woman would say because he learned English from his wife.

“I was thinking of you today,” she tells him.

“Just today?”

“Cheeky,” she whispers, pinching him.

He beams. “I have a present for you.”

“Oh.” Jean breathing against his neck, Jean reaching into his pants. “I know.”

“Different present,” he tells her lips. “Wrong pocket.” He withdraws a somewhat wrinkled joint from the back of his jeans, burnt and stinky at the top and, upon inspection, rolled quite amateurishly—too loose. Jean raises her eyebrows at the new fun between them.

“I found Ola ‘studying.’ Out the window like I’m born yesterday.”

“How responsible of you to confiscate.”

Now _he_ waggles his eyebrows. “Responsible.”

Then there is sneaking down to the balcony, past the music emerging from Otis’s room. There is sliding the porch door shut with the utmost precision so as not to make noise, there is Jean forgetting her shoes and jumping at the smack of cool wood on her bare feet. They sit facing each other in her sturdy chairs, close enough to kiss, so close that Jakob can tuck Jean’s feet under his right arm. _Warm now_. He coughs when they light it—“Va _fan_ ”—and she can see him at fifteen, skinny and reckless. When he was young he used to go cliff jumping with his brothers at the High Coast.

“All boys,” he tells her, of his family. “Uncivilized people.” He says it with a grin that means he is close with them still.

“Now you’re outnumbered.” In her former life Jean was outnumbered, a woman with two boys, laughing at their messes.

He nods and shakes his head at once. “God. So many fucking girls.”

“I worry I’ll never understand him,” she thinks of Otis. “The harder I look …”

“The less we seem to know.”

“You get it.” She smokes archly, like a silent film star, like she’s about to drop the thing.

He squeezes her ankle. “It’s so hard because … you know, certain things, I can never give them. Can never do for them. I can try. But I can never know their experience. I can never tell them what it is to be … a woman, a grown woman. I can only say yes when they tell me it is very hard. I can only protect them.”

“You try so hard,” Jean acknowledges. “To protect them.”

“They know too much.”

She nods. “Otis was … six, seven? When he saw my ex with another woman. In our home.” Then she holds up a hand. “It isn’t the same—”

“No,” Jakob concedes. “But that’s not how a boy should see his father.”

Then they are quiet, listening to the water and the breeze. In a boathouse on the river the lights go out.

“What do you think,” Jakob begins very seriously, and only as he tickles her calf does she remember that it’s prickly—she hasn’t shaved. “Of a baklava … with lavender?”


End file.
